This report provides exploratory and preliminary correlation analyses between sex hormones and T2 unretouched, raw hippocampal subfield data from the Healthy Aging Study sample (subjects 333 - 437, with 438 appended).
Black diamond point are the group means. Highlighted in purple triangle point and purple line is subject 438. Note that subject 438 was on estrogen HRT at the time of her scan and blood draw.
Cleaning data steps included:
Sample size:
Subject 438: average volume of 0.545094
Subject 438: average volume of 0.2098802
Subject 438: average volume of 0.6703311
Subject 438: average volume of 0.4225437
Subject 438: average volume of 1.432311
Subject 438: average volume of 1.574246
Subject 438: average volume of 0.3014333
Subregion volumes for women and men were generally normally distributed. There appears to be two women whose SUB volumes appear to be outliers.
No significant trends seen in Pearson correlations for CA1, CA23, DG volumes.
No significant trends seen in Pearson correlations for estradiol, testosterone, or DHEAS.
No significant trends seen in Pearson correlations for men.
For progesterone, it was significantly positively correlated with ERC volume for post-menopausal women (p = 0.013) and significantly negatively correlated with ERC volume for pre-menopausal women (p = 0.035). However, the overall correlation between progesterone and ERC volume among women altogether was not significant. Progesterone was also marginally, positively correlated with PHC volume in women (p = 0.052), but could just be an effect of the outlier where a peri-menopausal woman has a very highe progesterone level (driving the overall trend and significance among peris, p = 0.036).
For FSH, it was significantly negatively correlated with PHC volume for pre-menopausal women (p = 0.04), but the overall correlation between FSH and PHC olume for women was not significant.
For SHBG, it was significantly negatively correlated with PRC volume for pre-menopausal women (p = 0.045) and marginally negatively correlated with women overall (p = 0.068). SHBG was also marginally negatively correlated with SUB volume for post-menopausal women (p = 0.068).